by Julian Miles | Sep 1, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“Lie back, Daniel Sixteen. This will be over in under five instants.”
I swing my legs up and settle into the logro, feeling the soft curves adjust to the contour and temperature settings supplied by my envi. Things have definitely come long way from my last forgetting. Not that I remember the exact details, but the echo of certainty – what used to be called déjà vu – hints me true.
Yarrie Four-Twenty Clone smiles and rests her hand on my brow, her entire forearm tailored to convey reassurance and gravitas with that single contact: I am safe in competent hands.
“Please drop your envi.”
A simple request that causes me more discomfort than the fact I am about to have three decimillennia defragmented. When one lives forever, the little things become so tiresome: shower temperatures, seat posture preferences, tea flavours and strengths, they all take up time and matter. So we have attotech personal processors – envi – to carry those environment invariables and free our matter for living.
I drop my envi and feel a lack that I cannot name. Then a grey twisting streaks across my conscious, is gone, and I feel lighter. My envi restarts without prompting.
“Arise, Daniel Sixteen. You are cleared.”
Man’s technology has allowed him to live forever. In conjunction with the need to limit the number who are permitted to do so, there is a need for those of us who are permitted immortality to remain sane – some early horrors taught us that lesson well.
The postulated problems with memory turned into hard limitations until selective memory removal became a science, two centuries after its genesis in the torture chambers of MK-Ultra. Amnesia is not enough: an amnesiac has simply lost the way to a memory, not lost the memory itself. Brains have a finite capacity and only a limited way to tidy up – after all, organically we’re still designed for around a hundred years of thinking at most.
The memory removal process has retasked an old term, and ‘defragmentation’ is what immortals voluntarily undergo. Formative memories – the first four decades – are inviolate. Apart from that, you can choose what you keep: the Euphorics only retain joyous events, Glooms keep their disappointments close, Screamers retain extreme events, Horrors retain catastrophes, and so on. The gamut is similar to the old book and film genres, but since we can come back from anything bar a total brain incineration, we are our own entertainment. Vicarious pleasures are a thing of the past for the eternals, and those who do not qualify for immortality can watch us for their entertainment.
by Duncan Shields | Aug 31, 2015 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I miss having Jupiter in the sky.
I know Earth is humanity’s homeland and a pilgrimage to her is on everyone’s bucket list along with seeing Olympus Mons, the Ganymede Borealis and Titan’s cryovolcanoes in person. However, I am underwhelmed.
This coffee shop is serving the purest coffee I’ve ever had. One sip of it has set my heart galloping and I feel like I’ll taste coffee for days. It would have cost a year’s salary back home on Europa. The unfiltered air here is stinky, layered, and confusing to my nose. Being outside without a faceshield makes me nervous on a bone-deep cultural level. The whole setup here seems oversaturated with smells and tastes and to have a complete lack of safety. People are walking around practically naked because there’s never been a violent, sudden decompression in their lives. It gives them all an air of terrifying naiveté.
Europa has no mountains. I should have gone to Earth’s prairies, I guess. Instead I’m in Switzerland, in what Terrans calls Europe. I just assumed that Europa and Europe would be similar. Rookie mistake, I guess.
“The food on my Europa is bland. The coffee is weak. The air is boring.” That’s what I keep hearing from other tourists. But to me, the air and food here seems unnecessarily complex. Designed to confuse and overwhelm. All native Earthers seem a little crazy to me with their bright eyes and their short attention spans. I think it’s the rich input of what they consume. Too many distractions.
But I guess they need it because the plain blue of the daytime sky makes me feel like this planet is unfinished. Like it’s in a blue room. I have no perspective when I look up. It’s unsettling.
‘Jupiter watches’ was our moon’s Latin motto. The eye swinging around to monitor our lives, taking up so much of the sky. No interference but it was keeping a record. It was the basis of our religion. Here on Earth, it feels like no one’s watching.
Alone. That was it. The Earth felt alone.
One tiny pathetic moon haunting the night time while the Terran light pollution erased most of the stars and then the powerful sun bleaching out the entire universe during the day. No Jupiter hogging half of the sky, no family of moonlets, moons, and halfteroids peppering every afternoon, morning and sunset. No daytime moonstellations telling young lovers when to kiss or gamblers when they were at their luckiest.
Earth’s history had something called a sundial that stood out to me as a symbol of the tedium here. It was a flat, metal circle with a triangle set perpendicular to it, casting one single shadow to measure the march of time by tracking the one plain light traveling across the sky. Like a bare bulb in a blue room.
Earth and the moon had the simplicity of a hydrogen atom. Like a child’s toy. A very basic protostructure of what a planetary microsystem could be. A blueprint to build on. I really didn’t like the crushing monotony of it and I longed for the majesty and complexity of my home sky.
I could watch Jupiter’s swirls forever, meditating on the storms. I remember reading that most people on Earth chose blue as their favorite colour. What a drab reminder of loneliness and simplicity. On Europa we had names for shades of orange, red, pink, and brown they didn’t even have here.
I mean, I guess I’m glad I came and all but I can’t wait to go back.
by submission | Aug 30, 2015 | Story |
Author : G. Grim
Do I know you? Maybe. Let me think.
I think we met on Betelle.
When I look at your face I remember tasting strange fruit. Like persimmons, but wetter. Sweeter. Like water falling in a garden. They don’t have fruit at home. I remember that. Something to do with pollination and bees and … something. There is a word for that fruit, but it’s gone now. Like the apple trees are gone and I can’t remember why. I can’t remember why I’m not at home.
No, it wasn’t Betelle. It was Lastly, and the fruit came from Betelle. The fruit seller looked old, but someone told me that she wasn’t. The journey changed her.
Was it you who told me that? Or was it you who handed me the fruit?
I’d love to have just one more mouthful of that fruit. I remember that people used to hate the rain, and now I’d give anything for that fruit because it tastes like water falling from the sky.
Do you remember the sky? I do. It was a blue so intense it was almost purple. Not the sky at home, of course. The sky on Betelle. There was something wrong with the sky at home.
Stop interrupting me. It’s very rude. You can’t make a memory wake up, you know. You just have to wait until it’s ready. Sometimes if you push it goes away and never comes back.
We went away, didn’t we? We left home because the apple trees and the sky were gone. And we’re never going back. But you were with me. I remember your hands. I remember squeezing them as the engines roared. Ripping apart what was left of the sky. Crying because there wasn’t any rain left.
Why aren’t you old? If the journey made her old, why aren’t you if we took that journey together?
Am I old?
Am I?
Who am I? I don’t remember. Do you have any fruit for me? I miss the taste of raindrops.
We stopped on Betelle. That’s where I tasted it for the first time. Oh. Oh yes. They grow it there, the rain-fruit, and then they send it to other places. All the places where people remember apple trees and skies.
You were there. I remember that. You held the fruit for me as I ate it. I remember the taste of sweet juice on your skin.
Why are you sad? It’s a lovely thing to remember and you look so sad. I was so happy.
Why aren’t you happy? Aren’t we safe here together?
I remember…
I remember I offered you some. You liked persimmons, back when they still grew at home. But you refused. You were so angry. I don’t understand why you were so angry. A whole world that smelled like rain and flowers and you hated it. And I was angry.
I don’t want to remember being angry. I was happy before. Why did you come here? This isn’t your home.
This isn’t my home, either. I want to go home.
I want to go home.
I want to go home!
Oh, Lastly. Lastly isn’t home, but it’s all there is now. I remember that. I remember the day we came here, ripping another hole in another sky. I had my hands in my pockets that day. I would have held your hands, but I was holding my last fruit.
You were so angry. You took it away. You threw away my fruit and brought me here.
I remember you.
I hate you.
I love the fruit that tastes like rain.
by submission | Aug 29, 2015 | Story |
Author : Rachelle Shepherd
He came into the house throwing looks back over his shoulder. He had the shuffle to his step that suggested less than legal activities.
“You have something?” I asked. He gave me a quick nod and shut the door. He slid the bolts, city lockdown style.
Barrel pulled something from his pocket. It was a tangle of wires around bottle green plastic.
“Are those headphones?” I asked. Maybe I whispered. Maybe I even choked.
Barrel brought me the bundle and laid it in my lap. We both looked at it, full of wonder and paranoid fear.
“Bring me the console.”
Barrel went into the closet and came back out with a box made up of processors, audio chips, memory chips, and software. He placed the black box at my feet. It was smooth except for one jack. It had no logo or label and it was fashioned with the old kind of power plug that went straight into the wall.
Interface unnecessary.
The one jack was a headphone jack, phased out of legal electronics before I had hit puberty. It produced sound. It ran voltage across its circuits to create the cold electronic beats of a constant current. Auditory hallucinations.
It was the kind of drug you bought from the back of pawnshops.
We tackled the process of untangling the wires, uncoiling the dusty knots of a decade, relaxing the tension behind stiff black rubber sheath.
Headphones are a method of injection. I could feel the straightened wires vibrating in my hands, heavy with a history of music. Emotion, straight to brain, quicker than the fastest intravenous hit. Humming with the potential for overdose.
“Do you think they work?” Barrel asked. Headphones are brittle things, prone to sound in one ear and static in the other. Familiar with abuse. Close relatives with silence.
I sent him stumbling around with the power cord looking for a plug in, that vacant expression made up of what goes into it. While empty it represents nothing but potential.
Barrel plugged in the console. With a spark, it lit up its circuits.
The console couldn’t be commanded. It couldn’t be controlled or directed. It could only be trusted. I put the headphones on, let them settle comfortably around my ears.
I plugged them in.
Silence.
I let the console work, let it figure up the complex algorithm behind the method of creation. Barrel was in my line of sight, asking questions. I couldn’t hear him beyond the mute sensory deprivation but I saw his expression, his excitement and anxiety visible in the shifting focus of his eyes.
The console heated up long cold components and pumped lifeblood electricity through stiff circuits. Within the headphones I heard something building. Something creeping up the wires. I heard sound.
Not the sound of language but the sound of expression.
I handed the headphones to Barrel. He slipped them on, slid into pure ecstasy. Sunk to the floor and closed his eyes, opened his mind.
There was a heavy pounding on the door. They were here.
I stood up, shaky and nervous. Altered, like an executed program, unable to erase the data log of my experiences, unable to close those forever open logic gates.
I knew who they were. Towering figures of authority, coming to investigate the electricity spike. Coming to sniff out the outdated illegal electronics of an era of art. I kissed Barrel on the cheek. He never opened his eyes, again. Then I answered the door.
by submission | Aug 28, 2015 | Story |
Author : Jacqueline Bridges
SWF seeking SM, 40-50, human or android. Looks not important.
The blinking type flooded John’s inbox. Delete, delete, del—he paused on the last: Android adoption today, new shipment, Middleton Square.
The Organization of GoodWill toward Men, Women, Children, and Android caught him as he slipped in.
“Have you considered adopting an Android, sir?”
John stopped, paying no attention to the aid, his eyes on the reader board above them. Android Adoption: Save a droid. Two models set for recycle.
The aid talked on, “We have many in need of a home. They’re very good companions, and still useful. No more shoveling snow.”
John cleared his throat, “I’m looking for a girl.”
“Yes, yes,” the aid’s voice rose with animation, “we have a number of females today. Many—“
“Seven.” John’s eyes went to the manifest list, “I’m looking for a seven-year-old.”
The aid recovered, “They’re often older, not the norm.” He referenced his list, keeping it from John’s view. “Oh.” He shrugged. “We do. She came in this morning…”
It was all he needed to hear. John stormed the registration table, fumbling for something to charge his account with. “Number 72108,” he spouted, “I’d like to make an order.”
The woman at the desk verified his registration. “Yes. You are clear to make an order.”
“I’d like the seven-year-old girl.”
The woman frowned at her keyboard, “Let me see what we have in inventory. A young girl–”
“She’s in there.” John tapped the table with his writing instrument, engraved with the GoodWill’s unification logo. “Came in this morning.”
“Ah yes,” the woman smiled. “Straight from Japan. Retrieved from the docks this morning.”
“Yes.” John grumbled. “Where do I sign?”
The woman nearly laughed, “It’ll take a while to process the paperwork and register the droid. And then there’s programming.”
His eyes dropped.
The woman twisted her lips, reading John’s disappointment, “Maybe we can speed this up.”
John’s urgency returned with the start of a smile.
The woman’s smile was more playful, “Let’s start with your registration.”
John pushed the buttons, signed the documents, and answered all the questions for programming.
“Alright then,” the lady clicked her tablet once more. “Your droid will update tonight at midnight. We’ve gone ahead and programmed her with the name you’ve chosen for now, Anne—?”
“Anne—a—See—a.”
“Yes,” the woman fluttered her eyebrows, “a very pretty name.”
“Her mother chose it,” he said, “named after her grandmother.”
“Ah,” the woman cooed. “Yes, very nice.” She was used to this sort of thing, humans naming Androids. “Well, she’s all yours.” The woman motioned for someone behind her, “William, please take droid E0067 around for pick up.”
She turned back to John, “Here’s your slip—just follow the signs for delivery. William will meet you in back.” When John hesitated, she motioned to the crowd of protestors behind him, “It’s better this way.”
John grabbed the pink ticket from the woman and hustled to his car. He didn’t bother with a thank you or a pardon.
By the time he reached the loading area, his hands were moist, sticky with sweat. He gave himself a once over in the mirror, smoothing his gray hair in place, checking for food between his teeth, and for his final preparation he tried on a fatherly smile.
The girl was small, skinny, with hair lighter than he liked, but close enough. He held out his hand for hers and she slipped her small fingers in his,
“Hello father,” she said.
“Hello my dear Annacia. I’ve missed you.”
